As a beekeeper myself I'd be very glad to know what has caused the problems plaguing the almond and cotton fields of the US, but I'm afraid that this study does little to get us closer to an answer.

The researchers took four hives and placed two working 900MHz mobile phones (a very common frequency) in two of them and dummy, non-functioning phones in the other two. From February to April they were put in call mode for 15 minutes a day between 11am and 3pm, twice a week. The hives with phones were found to produce less honey, and their queens laid fewer eggs.

Combined with previous studies that found adverse effects on honeybees from electrical power lines, the researchers conclude that 'the present study therefore suggests that colony collapse does occur as a result of exposure to cellphone radiations,' but it does nothing of the sort.

Four hives is an incredibly small sample size, and every beekeeper will tell you that hives right next to each other can thrive or fail for a huge variety of reasons. No sensible conclusion can be drawn from such a tiny experiment.

It's also the case that most colony collapse has been observed in rural America, where mobile phone coverage is poor. No attempt to measure signal strength in fields where colonies have been lost was made. The researchers note that the countries that have reported CCD (the US, areas of southern Europe) are all in the developed world, where mobile phones are ubiquitous, whereas countries such as India, where technology that generates electromagnetic radiation is 'comparatively new' are unaffected. As GSM 900MHz networks are very common in India and throughout the developing world, this is clearly false. The UK is also unaffected by CCD, and we have some of the best mobile phone coverage in the world.

No mention is made of the relative locations or other environmental factors affecting the hives. No attempt to justify the concept of 'electrosmog' is made, even though no such thing has been shown to exist or have any effect on magnetite, the mineral in bees' brains that the researchers say is used for navigation. It is not clear that bees do actually use magnetite for navigation, it's often held that they navigate by the sun and by memorising landmarks.

It's not even yet clear that CCD itself exists as a single entity. Colonies collapse. They always have and they always will, it's part of the life cycle of the bee. When a queen reaches the end of her life and another can't be raised, or an area runs short of food or water, or the site becomes unliveable, or there's a particularly cold winter, or the level of pests becomes overwhelming or disease strikes, then the colony becomes untenable and collapses. Others are founded by queens that have left existing colonies and the population rises again. It could be that there is some new cause for an increased number of collapses, or it could be that the old, well-established causes of pests, diseases, insecticides and habitat loss have combined in a few places so it looks as though there is a new threat but in fact there isn't.

There has been a problem with hive loss in the UK in the last few years as our buzzing friends have struggled with varroa mite infestation and, most importantly, damp summers and cold winters, but last winter was the best for some time. Just 17 per cent of colonies didn't survive into the spring of 2010 in the UK. Only 12 per cent in the South-East of England died off. These are good figures and a cause for celebration after some worrying years.

Panicked flapping around and hasty surveys masquerading as genuine, deliberate, reasoned science won't get us anywhere.